Not long ago, Martha Stewart hosted a Homemade Knitwear Day on her regular TV show. Cecily Glowik was taken with the knitted animals featured on the program. She sent an email around the office with a link to photos. I responded by asking Cecily if she’d work up a knitted animal for our web letter. She sat down with needles and a few balls of Aspen and got to work.

I’d like to introduce you to L’Owell, Cecily’s latest project and, as she says, her newest friend!

The Story:

Never having knitted anything like a toy before, I wasn’t sure how to go about it. But once the idea took hold, I couldn’t wait to get home and get started. I had some Aspen that I wanted to use because it is incredibly soft and I love the big size of the stitches. I then had to decide what animal I would make. I’d seen knitted bears, rabbits, cats, and even a stingray and an elephant. I figured that if I wanted to be original, I had better come up with something that hadn’t already been done.

I remembered how my friend Melissa (a.k.a. Roxy) tells the kids in the pre-school class that she teaches, that HER favorite animal is the baby owl or owlet. I immediately got started on an owl. I had the idea that I could start with a short I-cord for the beak and work out from there to form a circle for the rest of the face. I used the size of the owl's face to determine how big the body should be. I spaced decreases so that the body would taper towards the feet and still be proportionately tall enough. I made the wings by starting off with one stitch and increasing on one side only. I wanted to mimic the lighter under-feathers, so I worked the underside pieces of the wings in white. To add another texture to the owl, I looped through and tied strands of Aspen along the bottom of the back for his tail and used white again for the under-color.

Aspen 50% alpaca, 50% woolI thought that Aspen, a bulky yarn of 50% alpaca and 50% wool, would be a wonderful choice for a knit and stuffed toy. Aspen is super soft and works up at about 2 stitches per inch. The large size of the stitches not only makes for a quick knit, but I liked that the look of the stitches added a bit more whimsy to the finished product.

Much of L’Owell was seamed up using the Mattress Stitcha technique that is virtually invisible. The Mattress Stitch is used when two side edges need to be joinedlike when seaming up sleeves or joining a front and back under the arms.